


Fledging

by catadromously



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M, Gen, Monstrous Maiar, Noldorin Academia, Shapeshifting, the author studies biology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:26:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26642947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catadromously/pseuds/catadromously
Summary: "How do I become a bird again?" she asks.
Relationships: Elwing & Olwë (Tolkien), Elwing & Uinen, Eärendil/Elwing
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13





	Fledging

The house of King Olwë faces the sea. Outside, through the flowering garden, his favorite path winds down, opening onto the shore. All the roads in Alqualondë end at the water. Your eye always slides back to it, if you look at anything long enough.

So, Elwing figures, it is a simple matter to find who she looks for.

By the earliest glimmer of dawn, she leaves a note for her kindly hosts - her family of strangers - and steals out through the courtyard. She follows the sound of the waves breathing, the most familiar thing here.

Because of an early high tide, many fishers and mariners have already woken and set about their tasks, so Elwing avoids the wharves and piers. Down where the bluffs tumble into the sea, she settles on a damp outcrop, letting her feet skim the water. Then, with her eyes fixed on the horizon, she hums a low song to call for the Maia she once knew as Aunt Uinen.

After the song she must wait. The sun has begun to show herself by the time the answer comes.

The water beneath Elwing surges up all at once, drenching her legs, and an Ainu's form condenses out of it.

Like many of Ulmo's Maiar, Uinen prefers a shape without edges, and the bodies she wears to talk to Elves and Men tend to unsettle them. This time she has built herself of driftwood and bladder-wrack, filmy frills iridescent in the daylight. Her eyes (all six) appear as deep portals, and through them Elwing can make out the passing shapes of fish.

"My dear," says Uinen, her voice the same rushing sound as always. "It has been so long."

"Yes, I missed you." She flicks a splash with her foot. "Even the sea here is a stranger to me - I half expected no one would come."

"Sound carries well beneath the water," Uinen says loftily. Her smile registers as an interference pattern upon the surface around her, but all at once the eyes turn serious, and the pattern goes slack. "I have listened especially for you."

Concerned, involved Ainur still baffle Elwing, for the most part - like occasional houseguests who suddenly move in and offer to help clean - but not Uinen, who taught her to swim. Who then praised her skill in the water by likening her to an estuarine shrimp, a complement she had treasured as the highest of honors.

That was a long time ago.

"I suppose," she mutters, "you already know the entire sorry tale."

"I was there with you the whole way, dear. All my creatures rose to the light you carried. But I have not yet heard your version of it."

Elwing hesitates a moment before she begins to speak, and then finds herself entirely unable to stop speaking, leaving no ugly parts out this time.

When she finishes, the tide has risen and Uinen with it. Everything tastes of salt.

Uinen emits a long, echoing approximation of a sigh, shaking her head. "It is good to hear it from you firsthand," she says finally, "and to see you alive and well for myself."

Elwing chuckles, rather humorlessly, swiping at her face and wishing to be far away, perhaps nowhere at all. "It is good to have survived." 

"It is! You have important work left to do. But that was not your reason to call me here, was it?"

Ah - right. Straightening, Elwing gathers her resolve.

"How do I become a bird again?" she asks.

After a beat, she sees Uinen's slick wooden eyebrows drift upward. "You might have picked a Maia better suited to that task," she begins. "I prefer swimming creatures to flying ones; you know that. My Ossë could help instead, or Melian - she was always good with birds, and she would welcome you as her own kin."

A wisp of memory rises from some terrible depth to surface in Elwing's mind: the sound that would one day call itself Uinen, turning toward the seething light of a newly-invented universe. How they both had wanted to reach out and touch it!

She cannot help but shudder a little. "With all due respect to Melian, my hands are quite full with the kin I have met already."

"You would like her though, if you got to know her."

"I can get to know and like her later. For now I know you."

A few waves pass by while Uinen ponders. She used to meet Elwing by the surf to share sea-lore, and the long meandering stories that the Ainur all seemed to love. She taught her songs of repair so Elwing could serve her people. But that had not been enough in the end.

"I will not deceive you that it will be easy," Uinen warns. "And you must keep your motives straight, else it shall only end in tears for everyone involved. This is not the escape you might think it: remember that even when you wear a different shape, you always remain yourself underneath." She taps Elwing gently on the sternum, leaving a seawater stain.

"Well, how do I do it then?"

"Like this," says Uinen, and lets her body dissolve. Swiftly and smoothly the stuff of her eddies into new figures: a dusky shark, a swarm of translucent jellies, a twist of fog. At last, like a shoal of silver fish coordinating itself, her Elf-shaped body coalesces again.

She raises her hands apologetically. "I simply do it, Elwing. Can anyone explain how to be what they are?"

At Sirion, Elwing learns to love the fish and squid and barnacles: cold-blooded, jewel-bright, good to eat in a place where the old fruit trees cannot grow. On this edge of worlds, even the birds, whom she once thought she knew, appear in foreign new shapes. Her favorite are the gannets. She spends hours watching them.

See how the settled, feathered flesh unfolds into angles of easy delicacy, improbable as a keeled ship taking to the air. See how they stoop and fold, fashioning a fletched and deadly point from their bodies. They fall with the certainty that only animals can know. Then they pierce the sea and vanish.

Aunt Uinen says that down there, they row with their wings. The air they carry makes them look silver.

You can count while you watch. Sometimes it takes longer than you expect. Either way they will surface, swallow their catch, and claw their way back to the sky.

A resurrection, thinks Elwing. Which would mean the sea was death, but that makes sense to her, because it can kill people, and because it is also life. 

"You have the flicker of an Ainu's wisdom about you, my child," says Aunt Uinen, laughing. "Does it not give you hope, to hear both life and death in these waves?"

"No," says Elwing, who is not an Ainu. "It gives me a reason to be careful."

Upon entering the water, gannets refocus their eyes as fast as a blink, which lets them steer themselves as they swim. But gulls and terns, like Elves and Men, lack the adaptation. When they dive for prey, they can only make their choice, tip forward, and fall.

The new star rises; the new star sets. More and more frequently, Olwë's duties take him south, round the sharp cliffs and into Tirion, to architect a war with the High Lords and High Kings. He has asked before if Elwing would come and give her testimony, but he never pressed her when she flinched from it. This time, though, she answers with a question of her own: "When shall we leave, and what shall I pack?"

She has had long enough to rest - or to cower. This war belongs to her, as it will to her people in ragged Beleriand. 

And besides, Tirion has the Great Library, and Uinen sent her on an errand there.

The royal schooner, though not the largest in the harbor, commands all eyes. It has the same elegance as a familiar fishing vessel from the Falas, but entirely lacks the subtlety. The sails bear ornate devices, and the prow is carved with a distinctive swan figurehead, its inlaid eyes glinting. The retinue departs with ceremony and carrying-on to match, enough to make Elwing quite uncomfortable indeed.

But the wind behaves, the horizon spreads wide, the Falmari sing loud and clear in their own tongue, and Elwing feels a lightness within her for the first time in many months.

Leaving the harbor, they pass under a great arch of brown rock. The bright white buildings and blue tiles of Alqualondë vanish behind the headland, and ahead spreads the fierce architecture of Valinor's coastline.

"A sight to behold indeed," Olwë proclaims, gesturing expansively to the cliffs. He may travel as a passenger today, but Elwing can tell he was once a mariner. He walks confidently over the moving deck, and his ears prick up to follow the wind when it shifts.

"Indeed," Elwing echoes. 

When she came to Valimar before, to hear Manwë's judgement, she had ridden swiftly above the land on the back of a Maia, who took a form like a tremendous feathered serpent. Now she watches the high cliffs pass, feeling a kind of dissonance. These walls, she knows, were raised up alongside the Sun and Moon. But in the stories Melian once told to Lúthien, you could row ashore anywhere along the coast and climb high into the foothills. From there you could turn back and see all the land laid out before you, from Tirion to the Swanhaven, the beaches pale and narrow like the curves of your own fingernails, if your shape featured such accessories. 

She can tell Olwë is following her fixated gaze, trying to figure out what troubles his kinswoman.

"They will watch me in the city," she says, which is also a true answer. "Gawk as if I were some new kind of animal. And that I can stand, yes, but - but the pity, Uncle, it curdles the blood. I do not want pity from them. I -" She cuts herself off. Olwë is better acquainted with grief than most others here, but she cannot risk scratching away their tenuous understanding with her own sharp edges.

"When they did the same to me," Olwë admits, "I wanted their rage."

Suddenly they have exchanged places: Olwë looks away to the shore, and Elwing stares at him in hopes of reading his face. 

He glances down to her. "The Noldor would say that rage is like fire. It can be used."

In his eyes, she sees old, old pain, and new steadfastness. New hope.

For the rest of the journey, Elwing feels far more at ease. Not at rest, for many trials lie ahead on this mission of hers, but not so much the outsider, either.

Tirion's harbor has a Falmar for a pilot. He brings them to moor at the great dock, and there Elwing notices the surprising number of other Falmari about. Many watch from their own small working ships, and many more have come streaming down from the wharf. The silver heads crowd in among the dark ones. On the uniting sea, at least, the two peoples make their living together.

After the fanfare of the King's coming, Elwing follows the retinue off the schooner, and a few of the watchers call out to her. She knows enough Quenya from her husband's people to understand their words.

"Hail, Elwing of Sirion," they cry. "Elwing the messenger!"

News travels fast, she supposes, when one does the impossible.

The city feels absurd, massive, labyrinthine. Garlands of flowers and stone lanterns hang over the streets, and the markets spill into the alleys, and everyone wears bright metal at their necks and ears and ankles. Finwë's people put them up in the guest wing of the royal palace, and Elwing has no idea what to do with herself.

"Go to the Library, as you told me you wanted to," Olwë suggests. "In fact, I might have said the same even had you not come with that intent - the Library is a marvel of Eldamar. One of my guards will go along, for guidance and translation, and you may explore as you please."

"Thank you," Elwing says, bowing her head as is polite this side of the Sea. "I shall see you at supper, unless the confounding streets of Tirion swallow me whole."

"It gets easier with practice," he assures her, then ducks through a side door to summon one of his faithful guards. Introductions are made, and Elwing readies herself to venture out, but before she leaves Olwë would like to know: "What exactly drew you to the Library? Do you seek something in particular there?"

"No libraries remained in Beleriand by the time I learned to read," she says. And she would have left it there - but is Olwë not family? Has he not offered her shelter and a listening ear? So Elwing adds, "Also I wish to learn the anatomy of seabirds, for I would become one again."

She hustles out of the sitting room, guard in tow, before she can register his reaction.

The once-Doriathrim, the forest-people transplanted, fend the gulls off their catch, struggling for a foothold like all beings on this salt-scoured edge of worlds.

"Fly away," they cry, "you theives who can only say your own name!"

Elwing helps to haul the fish away for drying. Her hands are plated in their bright scales, and she smells like water creatures dragged into the sun. She listens to the gulls clamor maew, maew, and thinks of how little they care what the Eldar call them.

They warn each other, greet their mates, wheedle for food, declare their positions. And some, indeed, say their own names, like this:

here I am here I am here I am here I am here!

Most often it is the foragers who say that, when they return to dry land and the noise of others.

In the dark, in her own room, Eärendil asks, "Will you sing for me?" 

He has lain quiet for a long while, as he always does on these first nights back home. 

By twilight on the docks, Elwing saw him scramble with his fellows to tie and furl and scrub, turning his dear Vingilot back into a mere assembly of wood, at least for now. Beneath the frantic energy, he moved with an instinctive grace, which he left behind to fall into her arms. 

She loves watching him at home in his element, the same way she loves to watch fish slice through the waves, but it pains her too, physically, beneath her ribs. Does a skill exist that allows seabirds and sea-families to endure the neverending leaving, over and over again? 

Perhaps she ought to look instead to the eyeless, glimmering denizens of the intertidal, their lives half made up of waiting. The ability to hold a rhythm: she can do that. Firmness of will and of grip: she can do that, too. But she lacks the patience and the trust. Her Elvish nurse used to scold her for it, but Elwing is not an Elf.

Eärendil's weight shifts beside her, and he says her name, gently. "Still there?"

"Of course, love," she tells him.

The shadowy room seems to sway, as if he has brought the rocking restlessness inside with him. That is the beat she sings to.

She sings like a bird, which he finds so beguiling - softer, of course, than the gulls do, yet still alien to her own people. Released, her voice swoops and soars, lingering in repetition, articulating no word that the Children of Eru can understand. 

Eärendil tucks himself against her, and gradually his breathing slows. 

Elwing knows how to compel people into sleep - she can remember fear, and a vast dim hall. And she can remember quiet, and small paired faces, their features confused by time, like stone worn smooth beneath a great many footsteps travelling the same path. 

But not yet. Tonight, the exhaustion of the journey already has him. 

Elwing, who can last a handful of nights without sleep, lies awake and tries, as always, to lodge this warmth into her memory, beyond uncertainty.

His presence flickers, soft and bright like an ember, and his memories tug at her. He dreams, as usual, of the sea.

In a crowded seabird colony, a new hatchling's sole responsibility is to distinguish its kin from the many-voiced throng. To that end, they begin listening to the world long before they wake to the light. A developing chick, locked tight in its shell, will stir to nearby birdcalls - it is learning which voices to trust.

The last time he leaves, Elwing watches his ship slip Westward into nothing. Then, in the empty space that remains, in the path of light cast by the sun upon the water, she sees the shining towers of a far city, the shining jewels of a far people. And with a kind of wonder she thought never to experience again, she knows that he really will find what he seeks. In the empty space that remains, in the path of light, she sees innumerable stars.

And that is why, when the warnings come from inland, she stays put, waiting.

Dark, glossy water slides beneath her, parting itself against Vingilot's hull. If she leans out over the rail and lets her eyes blur in the blackness, she can almost make out great shapes unmoving in the depths, like a city drowned. 

Elwing blinks, and it dissolves. Once she might have tried to parse meaning from an upwelling of knowledge like that, but none of it means anything to her now. Not after her failure, not after what happened next.

From above, from a bird's view, this empty ocean filled her senses with delirious familiarity. In her terror she had given herself up to it, knowing only the blinding need to flee, the one path to safety. Wind. Rain. Light. How did she learn the way? Did she even realize it was Eärendil she sought? For under the sun, it has all corroded in her mind. She can no longer distinguish her memory of flight from that of falling.

Her husband comes to stand beside her. He wears the Silmaril well. For him it shines steadily.

The noises of weather and water make her raise her voice for the question. "How did you know me?"

She has no need to clarify further.

"We could all tell you were no mere gull," Eärendil recounts. "As one can with a Maia in animal form."

"Then I might have been any messenger." Elwing has been picking at the wood of the rail; she forces her hands still and looks to Eärendil's eyes. "Yet you reached out to me. None of the others did that."

Eärendil ponders for a moment, squinting, glancing to the sky. Then his face lights with realization. "Your voice," he says. "I could recognize it anywhere."

Gondolin, Doriath, and Nargothrond had all held admirable libraries, once. They had burned and rotted. Sirion's refugees owned eight intact texts between them, each light enough for the owner to carry on their back.

The Great Library of Tirion outmatches every collection that ever existed in Beleriand. 

It is so large, the scholars have divided its texts into twelve categories, based on subject matter, and housed them accordingly. Treatises on the nature of birds, for example, can be found in the Animal Sciences section.

Elwing fortifies a small desk with books. Her attendant guard sits beside her, lending aid in translation.

The Vanyar paint marvelous pictures of birds, plates upon plates of bright feathered creatures near alive with motion: twirling swallows, patient ospreys, meticulous sandpipers. And species the likes of which she has never even heard tell, with eyespots on their tails, with yellow crowns above their graceful necks; the shrill kirinki, the flightless, sharp-clawed noritaiwi. Vanyarin authors describe falcon hunts and pet finches and the bird divination brought over from Cuiviénen. 

The Noldor dissect their specimens. They lay open the tight weavings of muscle to expose the inner mechanics. Avian ribs have hinges, they write. (Elwing knew that already - she remembers the feeling of breathing as a gull.) The bones of the wing correspond to those of our own arms, they write. (Elwing remembers that too).

She cannot see how any of this will help her. Aunt Uinen needs neither facts nor measurements to flow out of one form and into another, any more than water must understand the shape of its container. And certainly Elwing's personal experience with the matter involved no knowledge at all.

Nevertheless, the texts fascinate her. Here are her dear gulls and gannets, and even the long-estranged woodpeckers of her furthest memories, copied and labelled under her fingers. Their feathers and their viscera are equally beautiful.

She reads until evening, when she finds a short paper on bird communication, authored by a hunter whose name the guard hesitates to pronounce. It takes her a moment to recognize the syllables in their original form, but after that, she returns the texts to the dutiful loremasters and makes for fresh air.

Outside, a mountain breeze traverses the city. Elwing pauses a moment, turning toward it and closing her eyes, feeling its texture. If she were only smaller and lighter...

Some sudden current prickles her skin, almost painfully, and the need for air grips her lungs. Startling backward, eyes snapping open, she raises her hands before her face - but nothing has changed. Still the same skin and nails and downy hairs, the same solid bones, the same her.

The tide is low and the sun is high. Elwing, old enough now to venture onto the flats without her nurse dogging her every step, picks her way over the wrackline. Close behind comes Eärendil, who is also old enough, because he grows the same way she does.

They turn their backs on the tough grasses that grow near the river mouth, headed instead for the headland's rocks with their hidden pockets of water. 

"We can dig on the way back," Elwing says, swinging the bucket that they had given her to gather clams. "First let us visit our friends!"

Eärendil laughs. He laughs more often than anyone else she knows. "Our friends and neighbors," he echoes.

Rare bright days like this, when you can walk over the land unarmed and alone, always fill them both with the compulsion to move, to sink their hands into water and earth. They may stand taller than any Elf-children their age, but they are still children. 

Eärendil kicks up little clumps of sand as he walks, and Elwing sings aloud in her bird-voice.

Together they scramble over the rocks, kneeling beside the largest of the many still pools gathered there. They reach for the fine weeds, which collapse into heavy slime when left to dry, and for the knobby backs of slow-creeping sea stars. Elwing runs her fingers along an edge of stone, thinking of mountains under the ocean, river valleys on dry land.

"Over here," calls Eärendil from a further pool.

Elwing looks up eagerly. "What have you found?"

"I couldn't say." He tilts his head to peer into a dim crevice. "Give me some light, will you?"

Elwing crouches beside him and lifts her Silmaril from around her neck, directing the light with a cupped hand. He worms his arm beneath the rock and paws around for awhile. Then he exclaims in triumph, withdrawing to reveal his find: a perfect spiral of a shell.

"Oh, that is a good one!" says Elwing. "A whelk."

Eärendil turns it over in the sunlight. "A shame nobody lives in there anymore. We could have brought it back for food with the clams."

"I never liked whelk, and neither do you."

Grinning, Eärendil raises the shell to his ear to listen.

And as he listens, his eyes come unfixed, drifting far away. His free hand falls still in his lap. He sways to a music that Elwing cannot hear.

This only happens occasionally. His father does it too sometimes, though he tries not to let anyone see. Elwing sits and waits, watching the wind riffle through the thin clouds on the horizon and through Eärendil's hair. If she concentrates, she can feel the fish-hook tug inside him.

Soon his eyes clear and he focuses on her again. He sets the whelk down with a resigned confusion on his face.

"Here," Elwing says, taking his hand and guiding it to the dense cold sand. "It helps to touch something real."

"Yours are different from mine," Eärendil mutters, but he digs his fingers in.

"Similar enough."

It works equally well, she knows, on memories from other lives and from one's own. Perhaps, were she an Adan, better at forgetting, none of this would trouble her. But she is not an Adan, and neither is he. 

Alparáto, the silver-haired cousin who came along with Olwë's retinue, gawks at Elwing. "You can do what?"

"Change my form," she repeats, doing her level best to suppress a giddy grin - last time she felt so eager to share part of herself, she had been playing with her children. "Only a little."

"How? And since when?"

"How I do not know, but I learned last night. I thought I might sleep, then instead found myself dwelling on something I felt on my walk yesterday, and..." 

With her eyes shut, she adjusts her stance, wraps herself in the sound of the wind that runs through the tastefully sculpted palace trees. Shifting is less like pulling something new onto herself and more like shaking something off - or it would be, it seems, if she could get past the awkward middle bit. But for now she directs the full strength of her remembered flight into her limbs, along with everything she recalls about skeletons and feather placement, until, once again, restless energy crawls over her body.

She hears Alparáto's surprised yelp and opens her eyes. Her edges have blurred, twisted a little. Her neck curves oddly. She can hold it for a moment - then the normal order of things comes to claim her again.

Open-mouthed Alparáto coughs a little. "That was... certainly impressive."

"Oh," says Elwing, scratching at the lingering itch in her spine, "you wait and see. But tell no-one else, please, not yet - it is a strange and personal project to say the least."

"I would never, should you not wish it. What of my grandfather, though?"

"Him, I will tell myself! After -"

And all at once her stomach constricts as she remembers.

"- After court."

The people of Tirion resemble the Gondolindrim in coloring and speech, but the similarity ends there. These are Celbin proper, intricately dressed, confoundingly tall, strangely gesturing; she can feel the long steadiness of their collective past, like treading over very deep water. Their eyes burn with remembered light. She had been right: they stare at her.

The too-bright eyes stick to her like the fronds of a clinging anemone. In them she reads curiosity and pity, as expected, but also guilt, sharply familiar and even less comforting because of it.

To them, disaster shows upon her just as plainly as her Sindarin or Edainic feautures, and just as illicitly fascinating.

When Elwing stands before the court to give her story, she holds herself straight as a sea-cliff's wall, and stares directly back.

"We clung there to the edge of the world," she tells them, "driven back to the same place where our common ancestors split apart forever, and in our grief we were as one people again. And when no help came from over the sea, when all that was once good and right grew twisted, we died as one people too."

She is not good at forgetting. Perhaps now she can find a use for that.

Afterward, in the relative quiet of the guest wing, she and her uncle Olwë sit side by side without speaking. Elwing traces the splendid geometric Noldorin patterns of the cieling with her eyes.

"Let them hear me," she murmurs, not to any Vala in particular.

Olwë's voice, when it comes, carries all the gentle conviction born of his long years.

"They will. They already have."

Facing each other on the high bluff over Alqualondë, Elwing and Uinen practice the shedding of humanity.

The Maia's presence, the pulse of power there, resonates within Elwing, a tone with which to harmonize. "Again," Uinen says, and Elwing thinks of gulls, their outsides and insides, their voices, the way it felt to be one. She does her best to release everything but that.

The prickle passes over her, and then the breathlessness, and the dizzying liminality. 

She can make feathers ripple on her skin. Her feet sharpen. Her fingers fuse. New strength, for flight, weighs in her chest. Through her changing eyes, colors multiply, illuminating the wildflowers with brilliant signals. Great bands of light arch over the sky, and a strange hum twinges the nerves in her jaw. 

"That will help you navigate," explains Uinen's voice. "Trace the light; show me."

She does, but upon seeing her own warped, feathered arm, the imbalance overwhelms her, and everything must snap back into place. All at once she finds herself flat on her back in the grass, under a perfectly ordinary sky.

Elwing huffs in frustration. "I still cannot get past the middle bit!"

Aunt Uinen's constructed face appears over her, tidepool-eyes blinking. "Yet you will. You improve every day. And was I not right about the anatomical studies?"

"It does help," Elwing admits. "Like knowing how to play the chords to a song: you may not need it if you only wish to sing, but it helps."

"I expect," says Uinen, settling soundlessly beside her, "that once you get past the middle bit, you will find it very easy indeed to stay on the other side."

It feels right though, Elwing thinks, that it comes to her without grace, that she must be monstrous for a while.

"Has any incarnate done it?" she asks.

"You are the first. But you do not belong wholly to the incarnates, my dear."

"Ah, that. It has failed me before." 

"I would not leap so hastily to such a conclusion. For what you saw did indeed come true: even now we all prepare for war in Beleriand, with a new star guiding us. And you told me too of your more recent vision, the one that informed your Choice."

"Then I misspoke." Elwing grasps a clump of grass with one hand. It helps to touch something real. "My power never failed, but I did."

"They would have pursued you even had you fled," Uinen says gently, and lays a hand on her shoulder, cold as the sea. "And when you leapt, you could not have known that anything still remained there for you."

Elwing's eyes press shut, blocking out the bright sky. "Do not try," she grits, "to silence one truth with another."

"You already know my choice!" Elwing cries, gripping Eärendil's shoulders hard. "Did you not hear his words? 'To their sons,' he said, to our sons also shall be given leave to choose! They - Eärendil, they -"

One of his hands has come up to cover hers. His face blurs in her vision. He too is weeping. 

They have learned, lately, that hope in sufficient concentrations burns to the touch.

In a crowded seabird colony, stray chicks die. But now, beyond the shape of him, she sees two figures clambering up the hillside. Her brothers - no, her grandchildren - no, her sons, whole and together, older than they had been - pause and look to a common point. Not at her - at something high in the sky beyond her sight.

She knows them for an apparition, and she knows the danger of trusting one, but what else can she do? Elwing reaches out to them. Her husband turns with her, searching, finding nothing but the green, green grass of Aman.

"I see them," she manages. "Alive."

Side by side, the two shadows climb back over the hill and are gone.

Elwing lets her hand fall.

"If you stay," says Eärendil, very quietly, "so shall I."

Oh, this terrible, singular freedom. Even Lúthien, ever sure, thought it might wrench her to pieces, kneeling there in the Halls of Spirit with a million reasons to leave or remain trapped in her throat. 

But Elwing cannot resist what they offer her now: the promise, and the obligation, of a chance to put things right, even only ages hence - even only a chance to see how it ends.

She speaks the words: "Then I stay." 

In a crowded seabird colony, every once in a while, a nesting gull will take in a wandering chick from a separate but similar species, defending and nurturing it until it knows how to fly on its own. Sometimes the chick comes from a migratory species and the alien adult does not. In these cases, even having nobody to follow, the young one will still find the path and head far away.

The clouds sail in and moor at the harbor, and Elwing climbs up to the bluff again, alone this time. Terns rise and dip on the unquiet air around her. She might as well be home.

One of the birds hops to the ground beside her.

"What do you want?" she asks absently.

The tern wants food, but not from her. He thinks today is a good day for fishing. With luck, he might even snatch something from a Falmar's nets.

"Do you enjoy fishing? I intend to figure out how to be a bird like you, and I think I might try it when I do."

Nothing could make a soul happier than fishing, the tern tells her. To follow the great currents of wind, the luring smell of busy waters. To throw yourself into the chase, far from shore, where everything changes all the time. To feed, to fly. To do what you were born to do.

"I myself was not born for it. Yet the fish here are abundant, and flying is quicker than walking, and I miss it. The most terrible thing that ever happened to me, and I want it back. Aunt Uinen says I must be careful not to try and escape myself, but I already know I cannot do that, no matter how I try. Still I would fly again." The tern watches her, bemused. She swipes hair out of her face. "Does that make sense? Even with no escape, I must believe I can find joy in what I was given. Or freedom, at least. Or even only see the sky up close." 

The tern thinks that it does make sense, but only in the strangest of ways. She is, after all, a Maia.

He leaps into the air and leaves before she can explain his mistake.

Is it a mistake?

Elwing has heard about what she is and is not for her whole life, and none of it has ever fit. Not an Ainu, not an Elf, not an Adan - no Elda or Maia or Aftercomer is she, but something entirely new. In all this confounding world, there is only one thing like her, and his duty has taken him far from here.

Well. Maybe there are three things like her.

She sees the terns rising easily. She sees them following her star, and following those who follow the star, to higher ground, to a new land, where the flames consume and the trees bloom with life. Can it be so hard to fly? Firmness of will and the ability to hold a rhythm: she can do that. Trust, she can learn, like all else.

Elwing shuts her eyes and steps over the edge into nothing. She falls.

When it happens, it happens all at once, without even a sound.

And she is

crossing over the Mountains in the footsteps of the Sun and she is

rising up with a body reclaimed from leaf-litter and she is

leaping down onto a new-sung shore and she is

reaching out to the sky as the shadow clears away at last and she is

wheeling into the updraft, weightless as breath itself.

**Author's Note:**

> alright, nerds, eat up.
> 
> \---conlang nonsense---  
> maew: S. gull  
> Celbin: S. (pl. of Calben) = Calaquendi  
> kirinki: a kind of bird mentioned in the Unfinished Tales, not found in Middle Earth  
> noritaiwi: Q. lit. "runbirds" i.e. dinosaurs. they're dinosaurs. it says in Silm that Valinor was home to "all living things that are or have been" and i'm here to make wild extrapolations. dinosaurs would've been a Lamps-era beta release animal, now preserved in Aman.
> 
> \---misc---
> 
> regarding Olwë's ship: i am absolutely certain the Falmari invented fore-and-aft sails. i will die on this hill. they must be able to sail close to the wind, since their ships canonically undertake long eastward voyages (to Beleriand during the flight of the Noldor and to Númenor later), and Tolkien said that persistent northeasterly winds caused all kinds of trouble for early Númenorean mariners.
> 
> regarding Quenya-Telerin translations: i imagine it's like Swedish and Norwegian - mutual intelligibility is possible with effort. reading is difficult, though, if, like Elwing, you only know the Beleriand mode. how did she learn Telerin in the first place? heck if I know, but Tolkien implied it. maybe Círdan taught her.
> 
> exact words of the Choice of the Peredhil according to Manwë: "To Eärendil and to Elwing, **and to their sons,** shall be given leave each to choose freely to which kindred their fates shall be joined."
> 
> \---ornithology (use scihub to bypass paywalls >:} )---  
> [of gannets and their amphibious eyeballs](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982212010573)  
> [of gulls who say their own names ](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236954326_Herring_Gull)(under "Sounds")  
> [of embryonic auditory learning](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-018-2528-0)  
> of Elwing's bird vision -[ ultraviolet ](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2880050/)and[ magnetoreception](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.0295)  
> [of abnormal migration in cross-species fostered hatchlings](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1474-919X.1970.tb00820.x)


End file.
